VIDEO OF THE WEEK / 'Lost' souls connect in frenetic Tokyo

Published 4:00 am, Friday, February 6, 2004

Photo: YOSHIO SATO

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Actor Bill Murray, right, and Scarlett Johansson star in Sofia Coppola's "Lost In Translation," in this undated promotional photo. The Motion Picture Association of America and top studios want to ban DVD and videotape screeners sent to Academy Awards voters of films competing for Oscar nominations. Studio and MPAA leaders say the move is an attempt to fight piracy, but studio-owned boutique banners such as Focus Features, Miramax and Sony Pictures Classics say the ban would undermine the prospects fortheir films to snag Oscar nominations.
(AP Photo/Yoshio Sato, Focus Features) Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray chatted during a meal in Oscar-nominated &quo;Lost in Translation.&quo; less

Actor Bill Murray, right, and Scarlett Johansson star in Sofia Coppola's "Lost In Translation," in this undated promotional photo. The Motion Picture Association of America and top studios want to ban DVD and ... more

Photo: YOSHIO SATO

VIDEO OF THE WEEK / 'Lost' souls connect in frenetic Tokyo

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Lost in Translation: Drama. Starring Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson. Directed and written by Sofia Coppola. (R. 105 minutes.)

When Sofia Coppola directed her first feature, "The Virgin Suicides" (1999), the results were so stylish and assured that few were willing to give her full credit. It must have been her father, Francis Coppola, people said, or her husband, Spike Jonze ("Adaptation," "Being John Malkovich"), who walked her through the mechanics of film direction and then supervised the post- production.

Such are the obstacles when one is a) female, b) the child of a world- famous filmmaker and c) worst of all, still remembered for a misbegotten performance as Michael Corleone's daughter in "The Godfather: Part III."

But with "Lost in Translation," her gorgeous second film, Sofia Coppola forever retires her reputation as a lightweight feeding off the milk of nepotism. A delicate, beautifully observed study of impossible romance, "Lost in Translation" is one of the best films of 2003 -- and a thrilling promise of things to come from an indisputably gifted director. (The film has garnered four Oscar nominations: best picture, best director, best actor and best original screenplay.)

Inspired by a number of trips that Coppola took to Japan in the '90s, "Lost in Translation" stars Bill Murray as Bob Harris, a middle-aged movie star who goes to Tokyo to earn a quick $2 million on a whiskey commercial. Bored, displaced and unable to sleep, Bob takes to hanging out in the hotel bar -- the kind of place where a second-rate songstress does a slow-tempo "Scarborough Fair" for sloshed tourists.

There he meets Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), the bored wife of a self- absorbed photographer (Giovanni Ribisi), and finds a kindred soul and fellow insomniac. The relationship is teasing at first, slow to blossom: They share an ironic detachment and dry wit, an appreciation for the absurdity of a tourist hotel that isolates and imprisons, offering a perfumed island in the midst of Tokyo's chaos.

Nothing is overstated in "Lost in Translation," nothing imposed, and as result the viewer finds a sense of slow discovery. Like many of the best female filmmakers, Coppola has an eye for the quiet, surprising details that build character and mood: the way a moment of silence or the look on someone's face is sustained, the cut of a costume, the magical framing of Tokyo's neon canyons, or the way an erotic dancer is framed by a discreet and amused camera.

As a film lover, one despairs of finding movies like this, particularly from American directors. Like Wes Anderson ("The Royal Tenenbaums," "Rushmore"), Coppola has a wonderful sense of dramatic rhythms. The easy, smooth contours that she gives to "Lost" have the power to envelop and enchant us, to stir up thoughts and reflections that work in tandem with the film -- similar to the way our thoughts are engaged by a great novel or short story.

It's a treasure to not be crushed or overwhelmed by an excess of noise and style, and the aural palette of "Lost in Translation" is equally as important as its visual scheme. Apart from knowing when quiet is necessary, Coppola has impeccable taste in music and stocks her soundtrack with moody pieces that recall Brian Eno.

Gradually, Murray and Johansson's characters find their attraction turning physical. Each is cautious and each knows, without having to say it, that they're living in an artificial world with an artificial dynamic: Thousands of miles from home, freed from routine and scrutiny, one does odd, sometimes reckless things. A passion that grows in that kind of laboratory can't be expected to survive in the ordinary world.

One of the benefits of Coppola's languid style is the opportunity it affords her actors to show their best. Murray, who reportedly had free rein to ad-lib lines in his funnier moments, has never been this touching. Burned out by the pressures of celebrity, fatigued by his advancing years, Bob is hanging on to a disintegrating marriage when he meets the 30-years-younger Charlotte.

He's a sad-eyed and desperate man, but Murray, a vastly underrated dramatic actor, fleshes him out so completely that Bob becomes doleful and adorable at the same time. It makes perfect sense that Charlotte, with her acute monitor for pretense, should magnetize to this sweet, shell-shocked man -- to find that sense of peace that arrives when bonds are implicit and nothing needs to be explained.

Johansson, so impressive in "Manny and Lo" and "Ghost World," is in some ways Murray's mirror, in other ways his opposite. While Murray suggests a man who's crumbling inside and out -- and yet retaining a childlike goofiness --

Johansson endows Charlotte with a skepticism and world-weariness that seem at odds with her youthful radiance.

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Coppola directs their scenes with the lightest of hands, and gives us a film so poignant, so funny, so free of self-satisfied bravado that one can't help but look forward to her next work.

-- Advisory: This movie contains raw language and sexual situations.

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